Adobe Edge preview

[signswi]

Adobe labs has just released a preview of their upcoming software Edge, which is for HTML5 Motion and Interaction Design.

Just a heads up if anyone else on the forums crosses over to web development.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/

 

[Custom_Grafx]

Thanks for that, looks interesting.

Do you think flash will be done with one day altogether? Or will there be things that can only be done with flash and will it always 'have its place'?

 

[signswi]

All things die and technology entropy is a very fast. Products like Edge and Flash Catalyst (which can output HTML5 and 'native' mobile apps) are Adobe pivoting.

 

[Mike F]

Cool, downloading now. Should be fun to tinker with.

 

[Bobby H]

I'll have to make up my mind about getting the Beta of Edge and playing around with it.

There is a great deal of noise being made about "HTML 5" and the various things that are tied with it, such as CSS3, SVG & PNG images, etc. Unfortunately the effort seems spotty at best. None of the leading web browsers are fully compliant with HTML 5 standards. The majority of computer users are still using older versions of Internet Explorer that won't even support SVG and PNG without a plug-in much less HTML 5 and CSS3 related tags.

And then there's the issue of Flash being a whole lot more than a mere web graphics animation tool. A team of programmers can't make a HTML 5 version of "Farmville" or other Flash-based games.

Even more funny, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is operating at a pace that would make snails seem faster than Jesse Owens. I read it somewhere (Webmonkey I think) the W3C won't fully ratify HTML 5 standards until 2021.

Many of the new features with HTML 5, CSS3 and other related technologies are great and would make putting web pages together easier and open more creative options. However, you really can only use those things if you're either willing to make the web site incompatible with many versions of web browsers in use or if you're willing to make multiple versions of your web site.

While the HTML 5 situation continues to be a stinking mess I don't see Flash going away anytime soon. Most web pages will continue to be composed using old, more compatible standards as well.

 

[signswi]

Flash can't be viewed on a huge amount of mobile phones, mobile development is where all the heat is in web dev. That alone is killing it as a web UI platform. Games for Facebook? Sure.

Note that it took a long ass time for HTML4 standards to sink into the lowest fruit but that didn't stop us all from using them way before it did. It's actually really easy to implement HTML5 and back-compatibility isn't too hard either thanks to tools like modernizr, et al. Way easier than trying to make sites IE6 compatible like we all used to have to do (if you haven't given up on this yet you should, excepting you have some ancient government contract or something).

 

[Bobby H]

I am not convinced anything is killing Flash. All I hear is talk from people complaining about Flash and wishing something would replace it. I think the biggest source of complaints are disgruntled Apple customers who can't play Flash-based content on their iPhones and iPads. So they're wishing HTML 5 will take over and eliminate Flash. That's simply not going to happen anytime soon.

Lots of new mobile phones do display Flash content. Many Android phones support it. RIM and Adobe have developed a Blackberry-based client. HP has incorporated Flash into their new WebOS based devices. Windows Phone 7 has Flash 10.1. In the smartphone space, Apple is the only hold-out.

Mobile phone support of HTML 5 is very very poor. HTML 5 won't work as a replacement for Flash in that area. The standard still must gain satisfactory support across major web browsers for standard computers. That hasn't happened yet and probably won't happen for years.

People still do the vast majority of their Internet surfing on traditional desktop and notebook computers. Flash is very well supported in that area. Phones and tablets suck at many Internet-related things, such as entering in paragraphs of text in a web forum. For "consuming content" I would much rather watch a movie trailer in true 1080p HD on a decent sized screen.

Some larger companies are already making separate (and tiny) "mobile" versions of their web sites. They see that as enough. Not many companies are going to go to the expense of coding specific versions of their sites for various flavors of IE as well as Firefox, Chrome, etc. So they're just going to stick with what works. And that's a very basic, tiny site for phones and web sites using old standards that work on things like IE 6.